Being an adolescent really is a nightmare a lot of the time. The best pop culture about young people has openly played with how quickly everyday life can turn into a horror show (looking at you, Buffy The Vampire Slayer), and the ways the ups and downs of teenage life can sometimes feel like the end of the world. So it’s fitting The New Mutants, the upcoming X-men spinoff film from 20th Century Fox, is going to lean into that sensibility. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Josh Boone states, “We are making a full-fledged horror movie set within the X-Men universe. There are no costumes. There are no supervillains. We’re trying to do something very, very different.”

Boone, who most recently helmed the massive teen-weepie hit The Fault In Our Stars, also revealed himself as a longtime nerd, discussing his childhood love of Stephen King and Marvel comics and emphasizing the twisted, unusual angle his superhero movie will take. Stressing that he’s taking inspiration from Bill Sienkiewicz’s run on the comic series—which began with issue No. 18 in 1984—Boone notes the comic became “a darker and more surreal and impressionistic X-Men series than we’d ever seen before. It felt like Stephen King meets John Hughes.” This could mean the film will feature a scene where Annie Wilkes says to Wolfsbane, “Doobage? Yo dirty bird, you’re not gonna blaze up in here,” but probably not.

Advertisement

The piece also offers up a few vague but unverified details about the plot. We’ve known for more than a year now that the project stars Game Of Thrones’ Maisie Williams, The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy as Magik (sister of Deadpool’s Colossus), and has Alexandra Shipp reprising her role as Storm from X-Men: Apocalypse; (and that it supposedly has the goofy working title Growing Pains). Now, EW’s source reports the film will deal with how mutants are at their most dangerous when their powers are new. “Held in a secret facility against their will, five new mutants have to battle the dangers of their powers, as well as the sins of their past. They aren’t out to save the world—they’re just trying to save themselves,” is how this mystery source describes it, which apparently means their source is a sentient logline.